This is a quick test shot with the Kodak Zi8 at the local KFC in Winton, Bournemouth. The Zi8 is one of the recent H264 HD video cameras, it shoots 1080p and with its upright face forward design is aimed as a rival to the flip mino but offering the extra bonus of a mic input, which should make it popular with social media people who want an easy route to posting video too youtube, facebook, etc and want to include great audio (very important!). It shows how the Zi8 performs handheld in a tight situation. you'll notice that there are no wide shots as the lens is quite narrow and in 1080p mode the 35mm equivilent focal length is somewhere around 60mm but this does help to give faces a natural appearance rather than the wall eye effect created in wider lenses. The footage was shot in 1080p and edited in premiere then output back to H264 720p for youtube. No colour, noise or picture enhancements where added.
ArcSoft Media Impression is the video editing software that came built into my Kodak Zi8 video camera. While it is very basic -- in some aspects not even as powerful as Windows Movie Maker -- I've found that it will accept almost any kind of video file format or resolution you can find, and will produce good results. So I make this simple test video using a large variety of video clips from different camcorders in different file formats to see how it all would turn out. It accepted every format I could find, all the way from the videos made by a crappy camera to an 0 Canon AVCHD camcorder, except for FLV and an old version of QuickTime MOV using the Sorenson codec (it decoded the video but not the audio). Media Impression can render your edited video in "HD" at 720P or 1080P, but I chose WVGA (848x480) in order to keep the file size and rendering time reasonably small. But note that if you don't already have a Kodak camcorder, Media Impression is not worth buying alone, because ArcSoft charges .99, and you can get an entire Kodak Zx1 or ZxD camcorder, including the Media Impression software, for less than that!
720p HD awesomeness shot from the 29th floor on Montague Street in Brooklyn, NY. To edit this footage (in Final Cut) I first exported the file in quicktime pro using the Apple Intermediate Codec (from the original h.264) This way I was able to cut without rendering the mp4. No color correction was made. The song is "Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space" by Spiritualized.
Posted in 
Tags: 
